Many of today's commercial and industrial work environments involve machines or other equipment systems that operate in geographical areas that are located remotely from one another and from a job-site command center. In order to monitor the health, productivity, and status of these machines, each machine may be equipped with on-board data collection devices for monitoring various aspects associated with operations of the machine. The machines may also include communication equipment for facilitating data communication between the on-board data collection devices and an off-board system, such as a computer system associated with the job-site command center. The collected data may be analyzed to diagnose health or productivity problems associated with one or more of the equipment systems.
In some work environments, particularly those that employ large numbers of machines, the volume of data received by the job-site may quickly become too cumbersome for the job-site computer system to handle. Many project managers and job-site personnel simply do not have the appropriate training to monitor and analyze the large volume of data received by the job-site computer system. To address these problems, some equipment manufacturers and dealers offer subscriber-based services that receive machine data from a plurality of job-sites in a centralized data monitoring server. The centralized data monitoring server may analyze the data received from computer systems associated with one or more job-sites. The data monitoring server may also provide diagnostic and prognostic reports summarizing the health, status, and productivity of the equipment systems to one or more project managers or business entities associated with the job-site.
Although subscriber-based diagnostic services may provide a cost-effective and reliable solution to job-site data management and reporting, the transfer of large amounts of machine data securely, reliably, and in a timely fashion can be problematic. For example, should one or more communication channels between the job-site computer system and the data monitoring server become interrupted or disabled, the data monitoring server may not receive machine data in time to diagnose and/or resolve problems associated with one or more machines. This may potentially lead to unnecessary equipment downtime and/or losses in job-site productivity. Thus, in order to enhance reliability of data transfer in machine work environments, an integrated machine data file transfer system that monitors file transfers between a sender and intended recipient, identifies potential data transfer problems, and promptly notifies the sender and recipient of any communication problems may be advantageous.
At least one data transfer system has been developed that notifies the sender and recipient of a successful data transfer procedure. For example, U.S. Patent Publication No. 2003/0177422 (“the '422 publication”) to Tararoukhine et al. describes a file transfer and data management system that tracks the status of a document or file to be uploaded to a file transfer server. The system of the '422 publication may detect when the file has been uploaded to the file server and automatically provide an email notification of the uploaded file to the intended recipient and the sender of the file. Additionally, the system may provide an e-mail notification to the sender of the file when the intended recipient has downloaded the file from the file server.
Although conventional systems exist that provide e-mail notifications when files have been successfully transferred, they may still be insufficient. For example, conventional systems may not be equipped to monitor data transfer based on user-defined file transfer specifications, detect exceptions to data transfer specifications, and provide exception notifications if the file transfer session was not in conformance with the specifications. Thus, in order to ensure the reliable, efficient, and timely transfer of machine data between a remote job-site and a data monitoring server, an integrated, “real-time” file transfer protocol that provides an exception-based notification system may be required.
The presently disclosed system and method for remote machine data transfer is directed toward overcoming one or more of the problems set forth above.